Phillip Zurcher's Techniques for Averting the Repetitive Tedium of Looping

SWISS GUITARIST AND composer
Philipp Zürcher creates unique music that straddles contemporary
classical, modal jazz, and progressive rock forms, using only an electric
guitar and an Echoplex Digital Pro looper. He avoids the rhythmic and harmonic
monotony all too common in looped music by deftly applying advanced concepts in
ways that still allow him to sound natural, as evidenced on his latest release,
Sonne 4 [mem.li].

“Two rhythmic concepts that I employ are polyrhythm and
additive rhythm,” says Zürcher. “Polyrhythm is
about dividing a number of beats in various ways. For example, take 12 beats.
You can either play four bars of three or three bars of four beats, but to
create a polyrhythm you do both simultaneously. This concept is especially cool
with live looping. There is a lot of fun in recording seven bars of three
beats—21 beats total—into a looper, and then playing three
bars of seven beats against it. Listen to ‘Sonne 4,’ or
look at the sheet music for examples of this [see More Online].

“Additive rhythms involve adding, or subtracting, beats from
an existing rhythm. For example, adding two beats to the 6/8 riff on
‘House of the Rising Sun’ will produce a kind of tango
rhythm. Or, you could drop the last beat to get 5/8. ‘South
West’ and ‘Continuum’ provide examples of how I
use additive rhythms when composing. And when soloing, I like to combine groups
of two and three beats in every imaginable way, which tends to sound like the
rhythm of speech. Doing this in a fluent way results in a storytelling
effect.

“When creating melody and harmony, I like to combine
polyrhythms and additive rhythms with symmetrical modes. I borrowed that idea
from French composer Olivier Messiaen, specifically his Modes of Limited
Transposition. For example, ‘Sonne 4’ is mostly based on
his Mode 2, also called the diminished scale or the halftone- whole-tone scale
[A, Bb, C, Db, Eb, E, F#, G, low to high], and
‘Continuum’ is based on Mode 3, also known as the
whole-tone-half-tone-half-tone scale [A, B, C, Db, Eb, E, F, G,
G#]. I love these symmetrical scales because they not only contain
intriguing polychords—chords constructed from two or more separate
chords—but also relate well to traditional material such as major and
minor triads and some pentatonic scales. So, although they are abstract
constructions that may not sound ‘traditional,’ they can
still have a natural feel.

“These concepts all work well for live looping because they
are mostly based on simple units that can be fitted together like pieces of a
mathematical puzzle. For example, my guitar solo in ‘Alien Flowerpot’
is based on a loop of two power chords that can be found in Mode 3. The rhythm
is 7/8 with 5/8 added, but the feel is rather 4/4 plus 2/4. The solo expands on
this additive rhythmic idea with additional freedom. The melodic motifs I am using
are based on parts of traditional scales and minor triads, but the same
elements are also contained within Mode 3.

“I have found these techniques to be a very practical way
out of a creative rut—and, after ten years, everything now comes naturally
to me.”